Chapter 31
Brody
Selena fell asleep in the car on the way home. We’d ended up playing three more times, and I’d be damned if she wasn’t getting really fucking good at the game by the time we left. It confirmed what I’d been suspecting for a while.
Selena Carmichael was genuinely exceptional at anything she tried hard at.
I pulled through the heavy gates of the house and up the driveway. I was exhausted, the jet lag kicking in, but still, it felt good to be home.
Home. When had Hade Harbor started to feel like home? We’d lived in the States for a while, played for other college teams, gone to school, and yet, none of those places had ever become a home.
The lights in the house glowed, hitting the ponds that lined the front gardens.
I shut the car off and turned to look at Selena. Her hair had fallen across her forehead, right in her eyes. I reached out and pushed it back.
When we’d gotten in from the airport, I’d turned around and dragged Cal right back out to the bar, thanks to a text from Beckett.
Deciding I’d watched her like a creep for long enough, I reached out and put a hand on her thigh. That outfit was as infuriating as it was sexy. I shook her leg a little.
“Wake up, sweetheart. We’re home.”
I got out and rounded the car to her side, opening the door. Cool night air rushed in and forced her to open her eyes.
She squinted up at me.
“Let me finish my nap. I’m so comfortable.”
“It’s cold out here, and you need to get to bed,” I countered, reaching in to unbuckle her seat belt.
My sudden proximity made her eyes widen, and she woke the rest of the way up quickly.
“You just love telling me what to do, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I murmured, still bent over, my lips close to hers.
I couldn’t deny that after the miserable time in London, it felt good to be close to her again.
“Brody?” someone called to me from outside the car.
I should have gotten up. I should have at least pretended I wasn’t planning all the ways I wanted to have this woman, but honestly, pulling away was hard. I’d fucking missed her and her rolling eyes and sharp tongue.
“Brody, what are you doing?” the person said again, and this time, I recognized the voice.
Surprise hit me. I stepped away from the car and turned around.
Cal stood at her shoulder, his face unreadable as he followed the small, diminutive female figure crunching across the gravel.
“Brody, finally, you decide to come home,” she said.
I blinked down at her.
“Mum?”
Inside the house, Selena wandered around the kitchen, banging cupboards, while Cal sat in an oversized armchair opposite our mother and me, watching her carefully, as if looking for glitches in the hologram. She couldn’t really be here, could she?
“So, I was passing kind of close to the US and just thought, why not come and see my boys so close to, um—Emily’s day.”
“Right. Does Dad know you’re here?” I asked.
My father wasn’t usually fond of unannounced visits.
She rolled her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. All the solid gold bracelets on her arm clacked as they slid downward. She had so much jewelry on, she never stopped making a faint jingling sound.
“Who knows? I spoke to Arthur to get the address, and your father was in meetings. Apparently, he’s taken his new mistress to France with him.” She tittered, a sound I recognized for nerves.
“She’s not his mistress,” Cal broke in. “They got married.”
My mother shrugged in a way that made me certain she already knew that.
“Married, divorced, engaged, who can keep up with that man.” She sniffed. “So, how’s school?”
“Fine. How long are you staying?” I asked her abruptly. I didn’t have time for this visit and all the emotional baggage it would bring up. Whenever she came to town, wherever we were living, things got messy.
“Probably just a few days. This town doesn’t have much going for it,” she said with a conspiratorial wink, expecting us to agree.
“We have a hockey game in a few days. You could see Cal play,” I suggested.
Cal had struggled with her abandonment more than I had.
I’d been so cold inside after the night I’d found Emily, even Mother leaving hadn’t thawed the mass of ice inside my chest. I’d only realized what it meant months later, when the house became a male-only domain and the loneliness set in.
Then we’d been sent off to a different boarding school in London, and I’d shoved all those feelings away.
They hadn’t been useful. They’d just been holding me back from becoming the man my father needed me to be. So, I cut them off and locked them up.
The sound of a glass breaking and a curse from the kitchen reminded me that lately, those feelings were threatening to break out of the box I’d locked them in.
“And who is that?” Mother peered past my shoulder toward the kitchen. “A fling? Girlfriend? The maid’s daughter?” Mother looked Selena up and down judgmentally. “Hooker?”
“She’s family,” I ground out, pissed off by her mistake for no apparent reason. I doubted Selena would care what she called her, so there was no point getting annoyed about it, and yet, it bothered me.
“Oh, don’t tell me the woman John married already had kids?” Mother scowled. “Messy.”
She had no idea just how messy it had gotten.
She stood in a cloud of a vastly expensive, hand-mixed scent, and waved her arms toward Selena to attract her attention.
She was wearing a designer muumuu, the kind hand-stitched by little children in some far-flung country and then sold in Milan for a thousand times the cost. She didn’t slum it on her wellness retreats and yoga workshops.
She knew how to take care of herself in the manner she’d become accustomed to.
In fact, very little about her life had changed once she’d gotten divorced.
She still did all the things she’d done before.
She had never seen Father much anyway; she’d always been traveling, and he’d always been at work.
The only people she’d seen dramatically less of after the divorce were her children.
She’d once told me about a life-changing meditation she’d done after she’d left, where she’d envisioned that an anchor had been fastened around her leg, dragging her down. In the meditation, she’d cut the anchor and risen to the surface of the water trying to drown her.
It didn’t take my fourteen-year-old self long to understand that me and the Cal were the anchor.
Selena wandered over to us. She’d been making herself a sandwich, which I could see had potato crisps inside it.
“So, you’re the girl who John has seen fit to introduce into our family. I’m Abby,” Mother said and extended a hand. “Brody and Callahan’s mom.”
Selena looked her over. I could feel her bristling at the loaded words. She hefted her plate in apology for not having a free hand to shake my mother’s.
“Selena.”
“Selena,” Mother repeated and made a slight face at the name, before forging on. “And what is it you do here, Selena?”
Selena frowned at her. “I’m a student at HHU.”
“Studying?”
“Marketing and business administration,” Selena supplied.
“Oh my, one of those degrees,” Mother sighed.
Selena shrugged. “Yeah, one of those degrees.” She glanced at me. “Just like Brody.”
“Brody had no choice, I’m afraid, when it came to what to study. I tried to steer him toward the classics, but he was too stubborn. He insisted on studying business—”
“He’s good at it, so why not?” Selena countered. She inclined her head toward me. “He was born to manage people. I’ve never met such a natural-born leader.”
The compliment came out of nowhere. Maybe to my mother, it was an ordinary thing to say. She certainly didn’t act like it was anything special. Of course, she was used to being complimented for nothing at all.
But Selena Carmichael didn’t give compliments lightly.
My mother looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Shame I’ve yet to see it, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”
She always got pissed at the suggestion that I had any traits like my father.
“And Callahan? How are you doing in school? Still struggling?”
Cal watched her with a blank expression. Her words pissed me off. Sure, Cal struggled with dyslexia, but rubbing it in his face and making him feel dumb was a bitch move.
“I’ve told your father that getting you tutors would…” she trailed off as Cal simply left the room. He didn’t argue or engage. He just walked away.
“Callahan!”
“He prefers Cal,” Selena cut in. She had her arms crossed over her chest and was still wearing that damn Rocky Horror outfit. Her mouth was painted dark red, and somehow, she’d managed to make her eyebrows all but disappear except one thin line.
My mother turned her attention back to the girl with the straight spine, standing unbending before her, refusing to be intimidated.
“Is that right? I call him Callahan because that’s his name. The one I gave him. I won’t call him a nickname like his peers do.”
Selena opened her mouth to argue, and I cut in, predicting this could go nowhere good.
“Right, well, I’m beat. I just got back from London and visiting Emily at the estate. I need to sleep,” I cut in.
Mother paled a little at the mention of Emily. Whether it hurt her to think about her, or she didn’t like the reminder that she hadn’t bothered to show at the graveside for the third year running, I couldn’t say.
“Selena, you need to get to bed. You have training in the morning,” I told her.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I do?”
I nodded. “You do.”
“Lucky me.” She sighed. She looked between me and my mother. “Goodnight, then, I guess.”
I nodded toward her.
“Goodnight, cheer captain.”
She rolled her eyes at me and walked away regardless, leaving me alone with my mother.
“So, now you’ve got to cohabit with that attitude, thanks to your father,” Mother said, patting my hand sympathetically.
“She’s fine,” I corrected her. I wasn’t going to get into anything about Selena with her; her opinion wasn’t relevant enough. But still, hearing her mouth off grated on my nerves. “She’s livened the house up, to be honest.”
“I’m sure she has,” she said with a scathing look at the doorway Selena had just disappeared through.
“So, what’s your plan? Will you stick around for the game, or should I tell Cal not to expect it? You know he cares a lot about you.”
She stared at me. I stared right back. There was little leeway in my heart for her puppy-dog gaze.
“And you don’t?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” She pushed herself up, swishing over to the window that overlooked the beautiful night view of the back gardens, the illuminated swimming pool lighting up the darkness.
“You’re just like your father, you know. Despite my best efforts.”
“I didn’t know you could make an effort from a world away. How interesting.”
She shook her head. “You’re so—cold, just like him. Mistaking discipline for happiness and control for living.”
“Well, we can’t all swan off improving ourselves all over the globe. Someone has to do the boring part: stay here and work. To pay your bills, if nothing else.”
She was silent and then sighed. “You think I’m selfish, just like your father did when I left. You learned that from him.”
“I drew my own conclusions,” I ground out. Her words pissed me off because they were true. My life was dull and passionless. I was cold. Aloof. Isolated. I hadn’t seen it before I’d come to Hade Harbor, but now I couldn’t escape the knowledge.
She shook her head. “He poisoned you toward me. I know it. You don’t understand what it’s like to live a life devoid of joy—”
“Don’t I?” I heard myself demand, way more emotionally than I’d planned to. “I might remind you that you still had me and Cal, but I suppose we weren’t enough.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child.”
No. Just a sister.
But there was no point in arguing. Nothing I said would be heard.
“You’re right. I do think you’re selfish. I’m going to bed.”
I stood and started out of the room. When I passed her by, she turned and put a hand on my arm. The touch felt wrong and unwanted.
“Brody, one day, when you live like I did for long enough, you’ll understand how I could break all the rules that society and basic common decency have taught us to believe. To want something for yourself, to feel again, the chance of happiness… it’s not selfish. It’s survival.”
I waited until she had finished, before shrugging her hand off and walking away.